Imagining iOS 5

While in previous years Apple has debuted products like iPhone, MacBook Air, and iPad in January and done an iOS preview in March, this year's iPad 2 launch event is March 2, leading some to believe Apple will eschew a separate event and introduce iOS 5 on the same day. So, just in case Apple goes for the 1-2 combo punch, just in case Scott Forstall takes the stage to "blow away" developers and users with what's next, we want to be ready.

Apple begs the question -- what will 2011 be the year of? We'll give you our want list, after the break.

Apple ID activation

Right now before you can use a new iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you (or the store where you bought it) have to tether it to iTunes on Mac or Windows and activate it. How 2007. Android just needs a Gmail address. webOS just needs a Palm profile. Facebook phones (you know they're coming!) will just need your @facebook.com address. Apple has millions and millions of iTunes IDs, Apple IDs, and MobileMe IDs. Let us use those -- or better yet, unify those first and then let us use our unified Apple ID -- to activate our iOS devices.

Moreover, just like when you login to MobileMe for the first time on a new Mac, let iOS immediately check the cloud and download our preferences. Let us type in that ID and get our mail, calendar, and contacts accounts, Wi-Fi setups, and all our other Settings synced down to our device.

If we lose our iPhone or simply update to a new one, we should be able to login with our Apple ID and immediately have our phone restored to a personalized, working state. Sure huge media, apps, games, etc. will still require iTunes tether to sync, but give us a basic on-device, online way to start.

Contact and status aggregation

Once we have the one Apple ID to rule them all, we need a saner way of handling all the other IDs and accounts. Facetiously I'd say just copy webOS' Syngery. Seriously, however, between email, IM, Twitter and Facebook status, contact information, and all the different online stores with often conflicting data it's annoying and unworkable to keep them all sandboxed and separate. We've been asking for this on iOS for years now as well. (Don't make Chad bring up those old iChat Mobile patents again!)

If we know a contacts online account, let us enter it. Then pull in their profile information and status, silo it so it stays internally separate, but present it back to us in a unified view.

Facebook is presenting email, IM, SMS, etc. in a unified Facebook message system now and while it's still a little kludgy it shows how the boundary between different communication forms are breaking down. Apple is great at "hiding the pipes" (the backend data sources that bring information into their apps) and showing the user only a single clean, consistent UI. They're doing that now with unified inbox in Mail -- regardless of which account an individual message is in, we see them all in the unified inbox. It would be great to see Apple expand this not just across email accounts but across protocols.

If I bring up Leanna, let me see her latest emails, Twitter and Facebook status, IM's, SMS, etc. all as "messages" (hey, let 3rd parties hook in so I can see Foursquare, Instagram, etc. if she offers them and I approve them on my device.) Then thread them and let me reply back to them automagically using the proper protocol.

App state sync

Taking it one step further, right now if we use an app on iPhone and then go and use the same app on iPad -- even if it's a universal binary -- there's no persistency of state. Unless the developer is syncing on their own or with a popular web service like DropBox, there's no way to get to your latest data from different devices. Apple could provide a consistent method for doing this.

We've asked for it before when it comes to games -- let Game Center sync our game progress between devices. If we get to a certain level in Infinity Blade on iPhone we want to pick up iPad and keep going from that level. But really, a general app state sync API would be even better. When iOS saves the information locally, push it up to the cloud and the next time the app is launched on any device, check the cloud for the latest state.

App store upgrades

Originally I wanted App Store trials, subscriptions, and upgrades. To be able to download an app or game, try it for a short period of time, then decide to buy it and if the developer offers a really compelling upgrade, pay for it without having to buy a whole new "2" app would be fantastic for users and developers alike. Over time, with freemium and $0.99 apps with in-app purchases the need to demo has lessened for me. And Apple has already announced subscriptions -- to much controversy, so we won't retread that again here. But upgrades are still needed.

iTunes knows what apps we’ve bought. We know it knows because when we try to buy a paid app we’ve already bought, iTunes tells use we’ve already bought it and that we can download it again for free. Why can’t the same system be used to determine, for example, that we’ve already bought Tweetie 1 and hence we can download Tweetie 2 at an upgrade price. Apple could allow developers to set that upgrade price in iTunes Connect, an extension of how they can set universal sale prices today. We’ve seen some strange screens pop up that seem to indicate Apple is at least experimenting with the idea, but why not pull the trigger? Again, it’s more overhead for Apple but the customer experience boost would be enormous.

File handling

Similarly, it's still vexing to try and get your documents onto iOS, to make sure you have the latest version, to be able to edit it and seamlessly save it back to the device and cloud. For years we've asked for a Mobile Finder app, or more recently a Files app, that would work like a system-wide repository for documents the way Photos works for videos and images.

Most users don't need file system access the same way they don't need everything running in the background all the time. What they need is the functionality file access provides in a way that's robust and usable on mobile devices.

In that way a Files.app would give us access all our documents the same way we go to the Photos app or call up the picture picker in a 3rd party app today. (Yes, pretty much what Apple does in the online-only iDisk app.)

Good on-device handling is only one piece of the puzzle, however. We need to be able to round-trip the documents from our Windows or Mac PC and our Google or other cloud. Right now we can do some of that, sort of, in a painful and convoluted way. Apple is addressing some of this in the new Mac OS X Lion preview with AirDrop -- a way to move files between Macs as easily as iOS moves video and print jobs with AirPlay and AirPrint. There are also hints of improved WebDAV-based sharing in OS X Lion Server. But that all still sounds disjointed and overly complex.

Something that combines the Files.app idea with AirDrop, supported on iOS, Mac, and PC, and able to sync with a far more robust, speedy, and reliable iDisk or WebDAV would be grand. While I don't expect Apple to include support for DropBox, Box.net, Google Docs, etc. letting the user configure them in a WebDAV-like manner would be outstanding.

Open Files.app. Add a sync source if you want one and have one. Let any app, including iWork, Docs to Go, QuickOffice, etc. open, edit, and save back the files. And keep them in sync. (Oh, and add similar cloud sync options to Photos.)

System-wide Voice Control

Apple introduced basic VoiceControl a couple years ago in iOS 3 for iPhone 3GS letting us place calls or play music. Google trounced this with system-wide voice commands in Android starting with the Nexus One last year. Apple needs to take the lead back here. There are lots of rumors that Apple will use their SIRI acquisition to bridge the gap but SIRI isn't voice control any more than it's a search engine. It uses voice recognition to tie into popular, existing search engines to provide basic, intelligent services for users. Steve Jobs has called it Artificial Intelligence. SIRI could be a robust extension of voice control and a way to "synergize" multiple sources of online data, but Apple needs to deliver the underpinnings and that's new, home-grown tech. (Unless Woz didn't just misspeak and Apple really did secretly buy Nuance...)

It's much-needed tech, however, so here's hoping Apple delivers it.

Elegant notifications

Apple's current badge, sound, and popup notification system -- virtually unchanged since 2007 -- is so unwieldy that it's difficult to imagine Apple built it knowing 3rd party apps and push notifications were in the pipeline. Android is less obtrusive, webOS far more elegant, and while Jailbreak has offered several interesting alternatives for iOS it's time for Apple to pick up the ball on this one.

The status quo is untenable. If you're on the phone or playing a game and one -- or so help you many -- popups appear you have to view them immediately or dismiss them forever and you can't even hang up your call or do any basic screen command while that model dialog remains on screen. It's like being a prisoner. And if you dismiss it out of annoyance you may not even remember what it was for later, and you have no workable way of finding out.

It's the last truly gaping, galling deficiency in iOS. It's the last huge item other mobile OS use to poke fun. It just has to be fixed. Fortunately Apple hired the man who designed the webOS notification system so that's reassuring.

It took 3 years for copy/paste, 4 years for multitasking -- 5 should be notifications.

Theme Store

Georgia said this well; Apple doesn't need to do themes the way Cydia or BlackBerry does. At least not at first. They could provide their own set of 4-6 themes to start the same way they offer templates in Keynote or Pages. They could sell them in a Theme Store and once the process was hardened, slowly open it up to 3rd parties.

There's a lot of money to be made in themes. Apple likes money. Users like themes. It's simple math, even if implementing it is complex.

I don't think we'll see it in iOS 5 but hey, we'll need something to look forward to for iOS 6...

Apps

iWork for iPhone, iMovie for iPad, a real iPhoto or Garageband for either... we might see more Apple apps as well. Photobooth is heavily rumored and seems like a given. Maybe a new Maps using Google new vector tiles and Placebase or other differentiating technology would be great. Even at the amazing pace Apple has updated and released a lot of the iOS apps there's still so much that could be done with the built-in and App Store apps that we could easily fill another post. (And likely will!) but this is another area to watch come iOS 5.

NFC, maybe in a discreet mobile payments app, could appear but that feels more like a WWDC and iPhone 5 announcement.

Conclusion

Like we said in Imagining iPad 2, while Apple is secretive they're also cyclical and subject to the laws of physics and economics, which means they're somewhat predictable. This year's iOS will fill some gaps, shave off some rough edges, surprise and delight us with a few killer features, and disappoint us with a couple inexplicable misses.

If Apple shows off iOS 5 tomorrow our guess is 2011 will be the year of notifications, cloud, and a lot more. What are your guesses?

Reader comments

Imagining iOS 5

You missed the #1 thing for those of us who use the camera a lot: Camera Roll organization! Everybody talks (correctly) about notification improvements being sorely overdue, but that's not nearly as big a mess as a camera roll with 1000+ photos and zero organization.

One of my top feature requests is the ability to add fonts to an iOS device. the current iWork suite on iPad is a non-starter for any serious content creation without the ability to use fonts other than the limited set included with iOS

How about redoing or adding new features to the iPhone Message app. I've been asking Apple ever since the original iPhone to have a button to stop the messaging from sending just in case you screwed up the message or you sending the message to the wrong person. I know most of us or maybe all of us screwed up on a message and sent it. Also add text templates and schedule functions to the app.

So what you are saying is that you want Apple to buy BiteSMS and integrate that into the Messages app. BiteSMS allows for an up to 3 second delay when sending a text. The delay looks like a red version of the "Sending" SMS progress bar, and once it fills, the message is then really sent.

It's wishful thinking for me that we'll see iOS 5 tomorrow... however I'm guessing it'll be much like last year where they held the iOS preview event in the first week of April and the iPad event in March.

i think they will reveal the ipad 2 and that the new data center (skynet) is open for business!1 it fits with what they announced a week ago that they will stop selling mobile me
so they will reveal the new improved free(to compete with google) mobile me

What about Airplay streaming in third party apps? That's my big wish. I use Zumocast and Airvideo as well as some photo apps that I would love to send to apple tv or other devices. Also print support for non- HP printers.

I would love to see an official call block application, something similar to iBlackList. I get so many marketer calls on my cell and there's no way to block them. I called Verizon and they don't offer that capability. Jailbreak is required for iBlackList.

I'm not asking for much, just the ability to customize my freakin SMS tones and I would be pretty happy for now.
What I want for iOS 5:
- ability to customize SMS tones
- wireless sync
- improved notification
- ability to organize/folder photos collection

you write:
"It took 3 years for copy/paste, 4 years for multitasking — 5 should be notifications."
it did not take 4 years for multitasking. the iphone has only existed for 3-1/2 years. the 4th anniversary of its debut is this coming july. it took 3 years.

I have a webOS phone and the key factors that keep me are notifications and aggregated contacts/calendar. I'm probably going for an iPad 2 anyway because notifications and aggregation are less of an issue on a tablet. I can't see myself getting an iPhone until this is solved and I have a 4G option on an LTE network.
Hopefully iPhone 5 will deliver and I can retire my Pre.

I got tired of rumors and imagining,so I sold my 3GS and bought a Dell Streak with android.I can understand now when people say how closed the iPhone is.
I can do whatever I want with my phone without waiting months for a jailbreak.

I'm all the way with you on the files.app. I wanted it after I got DocsToGo. Although that application has it's own file manager , I have to remember to sync that separately. However , I sync my iPhone every day and that's something I'll remember to do.
The second I read that Lion was getting AirDrop , I requested that they do it between two or more iOS devices.
I've used voice control with an EVO and it doesn't work as well as voice control for iPhone does. I know the iPhone has limited functions so figuring out what I said wouldn't be difficult. However in terms of finding contacts, it can be less accurate , especially if a name is pronounced differently and the phone pronouces it another way. I see a problem with searching for completely random things using universal voice control for the iPhone , like to use a search engine.

The only REALLY important thing for me is the notifications!!! Geez! Please Apple! Learn from WebOS and Android! EVEN BLACKBERRY! The new BB OS6 has a pull down menu with notifications and previews! I really hate doing something and someone on their blackberry with the enter key gets enter-happy and sends me:
Hi!
What's up?
I'm
here
at the park
with the dog
and we're
having
a
great
time!
And for every message I get a darn popup!! LOL! Please! FIX THIS APPLE!

How about auto unlock out of your holster like the Berry. It takes too damm long to make a call on an iphone
Click/ swipe/ tap/ tap / tap again. Or speed dial on all keypad numbers. Or home button click to activate phone.
As marvelous as the iphome is for other things it still is a horible phone

I assume the image in the notifications section is from LockInfo. How does one get the Favorites images in there? After seeing that image I checked. I can't seem to locate how to make it work or see an addon that would implement it.

I feel like the notifications system needs the most attention. Apple you utilize their technology with finger gestures to give users access to a notification drawer, much like Android. Coming from an Android device, I miss the extras that Android throws in. Folders for photos are another addition that would compliment the wonderful interface Apple offers.

I would personally like to see Apple develop / implement an iChat app for all of the iOS devices available. Something where all iOS users can have their own chatting and instant messaging platform like what you get out of BBM from RIM. I know without a shadow of a doubt that Apple could develop a killer app for something like this and combine it with Facetime or whatever for the video chatting capabilities as well. I just think if they went ahead and made something like that, it would satisfy a lot of iPhone users and also draw in some of those stubborn BlackBerry users who cling to their BBM.
I also have to agree that Themes is probably the next biggest thing Apple could do for the iOS platform, and I'm really hoping that's something they're taking into consideration for next years software update. I think people would jump at the chance to be able to customize the look and feel of their iPhone's UI and I personally feel like that's the only thing Android has over it.
My two cents anyways.

I don't know if anyone commented it here, but I have more than one account and it's pretty annoying to update. I mean, "you don't have other updates with this account, login, password, this account is only valid in..., check for updates" is a pain.

Full VoiceControl, unified notifications system for all apps and messages (probably using the space on the multitasking screen, the static app image with multitasking bar bellow does nothing there!) and wireless syncing.